Who ever knew that one could be a science fiction fan, comic book reader and horror movie watcher and still be cool? Well its possible and veteran science fiction author John Shirley proves it. he keeps his street cred by writing lyrics for the Blue Oyster Cult and having been in no less than a half dozen punk bands in the 1970s. Hes also an old friend of William Gibsons and was the co-writer on the first Crow movie.

His latest book is Crawlers and its the story of a small California town three years after a top-secret project went wrong. A capsule that crashes from space with an out-of-control nanotechnology experiment it contains. The nanoparticles evolved into a group mind and the teenagers who are most resistant must fight to get their town back.

John Shirley: My direct inspiration was that I had a picture in my mind of a little old man walking through the suburbs one day and his hands extend out on metal pistons and then he crawls up the side of his house. His lower legs extend to five feet longer than they were and his fingers pull him up like a daddy long legs. His head twists around to look at me and his mouth opens with a metal thread coming up. I had to justify this image in a story. But unconsciously I think is a distillation of my perception of our loss of freedom due to technology. Its an ironic loss of freedom because technology makes us freer in some ways. The truth is in the extra time technology gives us we might be engaging in some other technology like playing a video game.

Im not a Luddite Im using a telephone and youre recording this interview. My computer is turned on and after this Im going to check my email. But I think we have just become over reliant on it. In Crawlers it becomes a nightmarish realization of that theme.

DRE: The book seemed a little Stepford Wivish.

JS: No it was more like Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Night of the Living Dead and pod people stories. But the crawlers dont act like shambling zombies but like human beings which is another part of the theme. In our lives we tend to be little machines walking around in our lives because we dont do things consciously. We can seem as if we are in control but we are not. We have to transcend that which is why I reference people like Thoreau in the book. Even before our reliance on technology we acted too much like machines. Our greatest moments are when we are free. We have an enormous potential for freedom we dont use.

DRE: What do you think of Suicide Girls?

JS: These girls are adorable. I like their makeup and hair. They also have other fine qualities. Unlike most girls who are pinup girls they remind me of World War 2 pinup girls except they are gothy. Unlike most of them they have the look of intelligence about them. Intelligence is sexy.

DRE: So I am required to ask about your experience with The Crow movie?

JS: I wrote the first three drafts of the script which based on my treatment which in turn was based on the comic book. Then Dave Schow came on and he did a fine job and the end result was an amalgamation of the three creative people of Schow, James OBarr and myself. Its a movie about death and romance which are two subjects of perennial interest.

DRE: What made them come to you in the first place?

JS: I saw the comic book in a store because I was specifically looking for things which could be movie properties. I found it as a comic book from Caliber when it was till being produced. It had a cult status but when I opened it up it looked like a movie instantly. It was cinematically incredible right from the start. Thats not an accident because OBarr was very influenced by movies like Darkman, Japanese samurai movies and rock & rock photography. He has a sort of obsession with Iggy Pop so a lot of the Crows body stylings were taken from photos of Iggy. There were references to the Velvet Underground and to Rimbaud which are also things I admire.

DRE: From what I read you were creatively into music before you were into writing.

JS: I was in a lot of rock bands. In the 1970s I was in a band called Sado-Nation which I was the original lead singer of. Then I moved to New York City where I was in a band called Obsession and we were on the Celluloid record label. I played at CBGBs. Then I married a French girl, moved to Paris and played around Europe. Ive written lyrics for the Blue Oyster Cult but none of their hits unfortunately.

DRE: How was it working with them?

JS: I was a great admirer of them as a young man. I saw them live in Central Park right after their first album came out. I was amazed by the guitar playing because it almost had a classical sound to it because it seemed to speak in sentences. Theyre music was intricate. Its the intelligent mans hard rock band. I was enamored of them especially their first five albums. When somebody gave me the opportunity to work with them I was thrilled. I wrote most of the lyrics on their two most recent albums.

DRE: I read this quote about you. Wild-eyed poet, an addict, and an out-of-control outraged and outrageous punk

JS: I dont know how out of control I was. I got into some fights onstage as a punk rocker. People broke bottles on my head.

DRE: Thats fairly out of control.

JS: Nothing compared to Iggy. People write and tell stories about people like Alice Cooper and Ozzy Osbourne and most of them are not true. But almost everything you heard about Iggy is true.

I remember once I got into this fight backstage and these guys broke a bottle over my head. Then I went out and did my set with blood streaming down which I smeared onto my chest. It was a great time because I wasnt seriously hurt and it looked great. Im sorry I dont have photographs. Another show was a Christmas show with a tree onstage. During the set I grabbed it and humped it around the stage. My thighs got abraded by broken Christmas lights but it was worth doing. Riding a Christmas tree to a punk rock song is a great feeling. I had a lot of drug problems that came and went. I had no ability to moderate so I did everything in excess and I nearly died a couple of times.

DRE: What drugs were these?

JS: I started out with psychedelics and then went on to injecting cocaine. I did heroin but some people are cocaine people and others are heroin people. Its about your brain chemistry. I was mostly a cocaine person. I would go through long periods of being clean but I had to go through years of being completely clean. I would go through these binges that would leave me feeling like a wet cigarette butt being stubbed out. Then I would be useless for weeks. I was trying to get out of that cycle. Finally its been ten years of being clean.

DRE: Some of the authors you came up with were impressed by you. When you first met William Gibson you had no shirt on.

JS: He and I were good friends. He slept on my couch in Portland before he was famous. I remember he complained the next day that he was really cold because we were these poor freaky people who had no heat during winter. We also kept him up all night having sex in the rooms above and around him. People were running from room to room shrieking and I never found out why. He came to my punk shows too. He once wrote a poem about my work as a lead singer. He was a good friend and we collaborated on some stories. We also collaborated on film scripts. We wrote a script of the New Rose Hotel which Ed Pressman bought but the director [Abel Ferrara] wrote his own script which I heard turned out lame. Those things we have written have languished.

DRE: I think Norman Spinrad said you were halfway to being a Marxist.

JS: I suppose I am a democratic socialist now. I believe in socialized medicine but I was never a Marxist.

DRE: How do you look at punk now?

JS: It depends on who you listen to. If you got to Gilman in the East Bay area there are real punk bands there. Its just a state of mind with a degree of intensity. The Distillers have it sometimes. I like them when the girl is singing. A lot of music people are calling punk because of a lack of a better name. They are more pop bands with punk overtones. Somebody once said all rock is folk music. It doesnt sound like it in the acoustic sense but its homegrown the way folk is.

DRE: Are you on the computer a lot?

JS: Im not a computer nerd. But I was known as one of the original cyberpunk writers but thats an irony because Im not heavily into computers. There is so much information on there and I prefer systems that are user friendly so I dont have to spend a lot of time tinkering with them. To me its just a tool and its a superb tool in the right hands.

DRE: How have your experiences in television been?

JS: I worked on VR-5, Poltergeist the Legacy and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. You have to be a television writer to be in television. I can do it but I dont think that way as well as a lot of people. Someday I would like to produce a television show but not be a writer. Television writing is a specific form and people who transition to television bitch about it to me because they dont understand that you have to write within the form because that is the nature of the medium. There are people who can break out in miniseries because you have more room to spread out in. one of the problems in television is that they have cut down the amount of time spent on drama because of more commercials. For example on the recent Twilight Zone show on UPN they were cut down to 20 minutes or something. Thats far less than Rod Serling had. Those extra few minutes really make a difference on the quality. Its the same for the hour long dramas. You have to put on fewer nuances. Thats why things on cable are often such finer quality.

DRE: Are you working on a new book?

JS: Im working on some projects Im not ready to talk. A book called The Other End which is kind of a positive apocalyptic book. Its inverting the whole idea of the end of the world. Its about spirituality and making fun of the apocalypse.

Who ever knew that one could be a science fiction fan, comic book reader and horror movie watcher and still be cool? Well its possible and veteran science fiction author John Shirley proves it. he keeps his street cred by writing lyrics for the Blue Oyster Cult and having been in no less than a halfalf...